The Robert Frostpoem, Fire and Ice,[4] has the opening lines, "Some people say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice." Frost based the poem on the two scientific scenarios of the time in which the Earth would either be consumed in fire by a supernova of the Sun, or end as a cold rock when the Sun no longer sustains its nuclear reactions. It now appears that on a grander scale the Earth is headed towards a Big Freeze, since the observable universe and its radiation will eventually disappear from view.

The halo of dark matter that surrounds our Milky Way galaxy has a powerful gravitational pull on smaller, nearby galaxies, and The Dark Energy Survey has discovered eleven new streams of stars around the Milky Way. These are remnants of smaller galaxies that have been pulled in, ripped apart and absorbed. Such stellar streams are are composed of relatively few stars spread out over a large area of sky, so they are difficult to find.[7] Only about two dozen such streams had been discovered previously, many by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.[7]

"It's exciting that we found so many stellar streams... We can use these streams to measure the amount, distribution, and clumpiness of dark matter in the Milky Way. Studies of stellar streams will help constrain the fundamental properties of dark matter."[7]

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The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn't know much at all about gardening.

This first major release of data from the Survey includes information on about 400 million astronomical objects, including distant galaxies billions of light years away as well as stars in our own galaxy.[7]
about 5,000 square degrees, or one eighth of the entire sky – and include roughly 40,000 exposures taken with the Dark Energy Camera. The images correspond to hundreds of terabytes of data and are being released along with catalogs of hundreds of millions of galaxies and stars.[7]